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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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So from having had a few exchanges with pro Russian accounts on Lemmy (which seems to be infested with a few very active ones) this is a summary of their arguments:
It was an invasion. Invasions are wrong. That should be the beginning and end of the debate.
I mean, there's usually more to say than just that. I don't think no discussion is the answer.
Well then discuss.
What justifies the torture, rape, pillage, kidnapping, Russia has inflicted on Ukraine?
I agree, but ignoring who started the war and who is the one actively invading who, while having already occupied territory from a past war, not too long ago, isn't right either. Doubting the motivations of the agressor with a past in agression is important. And yes, "TheWest"™ does it too, but Ukraine, who revolted their puppet government (as told to me by people I know from there) in 2014 and having been invaded as a result, isn't really an agressor to other countries.
I'm from northern Spain, we have had our fair share of civil revolts, the sides I support lost, and I would be SO angry with portugal or france if they had militarily intervened. Several international volunteers came to help in several of them, but volunteers != an official invasion.
I honestly feel like several commies hate "TheWest"™, and by proxy anyone that wants to be related to them so they just eat up the "There's Nazis in power in Ukraine" speech Putin used.
And yeah, context is important, this is what I know about the whole thing, told to me by my partner, whose family lives in Ukraine and lightly searched by me:
There was a revolt in Ukrained around 2013, where they took away the alleged corrupt puppet president that was manipulating elections and funnelling tons of money to Russia. He has to flee the country when people went to his home, and he apparently had a golden toilet. So after that elections were done and another dude was put in power.
They started to de-russiafy some stuff because they were fed up of russia's influence in a separate sovereign country, and as a result Russia invaded in 2014. They took Crimea, taking the home away from several Crimean Tatars who were originally from there. Ukraine tried to get international help but since "TheWest"™ didn't want a full scale war against Russia, they kinda forced Ukraine to give up Crimea, since they obviously don't have enough resources to defend alone.
Zelensky, an actor, made a TV show where he starred as a good professor that suddenly became president, and fought against the big bad of the country, corruption and oligarchs. People were quite happy by the idea he was promoting, and after popular demand he tried for elections, going into power with a huge majority. He started to de-russiafy again and try to gain more economical support of "TheWest"™, which are the countried whom they have most economical relations. He wanted to join both the EU and NATO, and Putin REALLY disliked that, since he felt threatened. Suddenly, war.
This time, "TheWest"™ decided to support Ukraine more heavily for what I'm sure are their personal reasons, but it's important to see who the aggresor is. That the US made a bridge for Zelensky offering NATO to pressure Russia we don't know, maybe, but the fact that a sovereign country is forcing another sovereign country against treaties that the second one wants is clear.
From now on, all the new info that I get on the subject is passed through all the before mentioned context, assuming that all info is completely tampered with. All of what I told you was stuff I knew about before this war, so it's not like it was propaganda, for me.
As an addendum, some of the family members of my partner work for the military (tech job), and told us that there had been issues with russian agents in Donbass with removing the Ukranian passport to people and giving them the russian one, I believe that the military of every country is fed tons of propaganda, so idk about this one.
What do we also know about Russia? There are several indications that they tempered with international elections by creating fake internet movements and promoting disruptive real ones as we have seen with the whole Trump fiasco. If they did so mcuh effort for countries that are that far, I have zero ounces of doubt that the manipulation strategies Russia actively performed pre-war, in a non-NATO coutry, were a lot more aggresive. Again, commies and tankies don't trust anything about "TheWest"™ so to them all the manipulation reports hold no weight, it's clear that there is a divide in ideology here around how Russia operates things.
I don't have any reputable sources to support my context because I can't bother to search for them, I'm just browsing the web while working like all of us lazy asses, but given this context I have, it's really hard for me and tons of people living in "TheWest"™ to trust anything Russia says, since they have a really long history of tampering with their neighbouring countries (Yes so does USA but this is about Ukraine and Russia).
I take it you had to deal with the Hexbears? Idiots.
Such a worthless use of brain cells. Imagine being the product of billions of years of evolution and becoming that.
I'm sure some are on a payroll. You don't get a weird narrative like that started without planting a seed.
It's not a coincidence they look like a better version of 2015 the_donald.
They even mocked me when I said I expected to get banned for saying that... and then banned me. Weird how that works.
Yes, the Russian troll farm pays me to post for the dozen weirdos who actually read this on here. Money well spent!
Makes perfect sense.
They said talking on a Lemmy.world post lmfao
they're on other instances as well
edit: having to go through posts like these and blocking all the invader apologists isn't fun, but it beats accidentally reading their drivel again
Didn't lemmy.ca defed with Hexbear because someone called (in jest) for death to landlords while Canada experiences it's biggest housing crisis ever and rents are rising rapidly YoY solely because landlords, who otherwise deliver no intrinsic value in their position, found a way to make more money from the increased demand?
No, that wasn't the reason and if it's the only one you can think of you have no idea how toxic and disgusting the hexbear community is. I hate landlords too but these people are really taking it so much further than joking about dead landlords.
That was one of the big reasons made in the post about Hexbear defed.
The other ones were nebulous concerns about Hexbear comments in other instances... Which, by definition, is the responsibility of those other instances.
The idea that you can't judge anyone by actions not in your personal instance is just such terminally online idiocy. Trolls always seem shocked that their behavior might actually follow them around rather than being conveniently compartmentalized so they can start their trolling fresh before burning out a new instance.
It's the instance's responsibility for policing it's own instance.
And defederation was the action that the instance decided to policy them. If users from that instance take up the majority of their moderation effort, taking into account that instance owners are volunteers and paying for the instance, it does not surprise me.
"whatabout America" - "nooo you can't just call me out on hypocrisy, it makes me look bad"
Whataboutism is literally a logical fallacy. We are talking about Russia, so talk about Russia.
You have no right to judge someone for what you yourself are guilty of.
What are they guilty of?
Hawkish imperialism, I guess.
(to be very explicit, I have no love for either)
guess we are all fucked then, all world powers are guilty of vile shit
Dismissing something for being a fallacy is also a fallacy. There are historical, political, social, and economic reasons things happen, and sometimes it pays to put things in context. Limiting the discussion to the thing happening NOW and only NOW doesn't allow for a better understanding of the events.
Also, someone pointing out hypocrisy of other nations shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, especially if it's pointing out the hypocrisy of the most powerful and influential nation to ever exist. You can see based on past events such as the war on terror and endless drone striking of civilians how governments could expect that to be the standard way of operating. That doesn't make it right, only that military intervention has been and continues to be legitimised politically by the international community.
Lol
I didn't realize Ukraine was the most powerful nation to ever exist.
There's a reason Western Europe focuses on the Nazis in the context of the Holocaust: the Nazis never saw the Western Europeans as a stain on the Earth like they did the Jews and the Slavs. Russians don't need to point to Jews to claim Nazism: they can point directly to the treatment of ethnically Russian Slavs during WW2 and the plans that Nazi Germany had for the eradication of Slavs.
Russia doesn't need to point at how Ukraine treats Jews because to Russia, the Holocaust is dwarfed in societal impact by the issues that motivated Operation Barbarossa. The Russians lost 19 million Russian civilians in the war, why would they care about the Jews?
Nevermind that minorities in China get so many advantages it's actually silly how much affirmative action goes on. Provinces dominated by minorities get significantly more funding per capita and even get loss-leading infrastructure projects like the Tibet and Xinjiang railways. Students from minorities get additional bonuses on gaokao (basically SAT, but imagine if schools didn't look at anything else). Minorities are exempt from family planning policies and get massive interest-free loans for starting businesses. They get proportional representation in government. Hell, there are 55 minority groups in China making up 8% of the population.
In the army? The prevalence of rural populations in the army has been observed AROUND THE WORLD. It's a function of rural communities being rather poor and underserved by governments in general, as well as the lack of economic opportunities that living on a farm provides. In fact, the entire notion of the underserved countryside is what allowed communism to rise in Russia and China.
Have you ever been to China? Ever talked to a person from a Chinese minority? Clearly not.
By and large their complaints are about a lack of economic opportunity (because, y'know, Inner Mongolia isn't exactly the most hospitable climate) and that the government affirmative action isn't enough to address the gap in resources. That's what you'll hear on the ground... And that's an absolutely fair concern.
I have. I've known Tibetans personally and I can assure you that they wish China had never invaded their country and taken it over.
Nevermind the fact that it was Russia itself that treated (and keeps treating) its soldiers as cannon fodder
I'd recommend that you read a more insightful commentary on Red Army practices during WW2 rather than following Nazi propaganda from that period. David Glantz' work is particularly insightful.
Either way, those are 19 million civilians. That isn't military dead, that's civilians.
One thing they always forget to mention is the USSR was allied to Nazi Germany in order to partition Poland.
No doubt the Soviets suffered greatly in WW2, and contributed greatly to the allied victory. On the other hand they did not do it alone, and they certainly did not expect to have to fight the Germans at all, at least not at that point.
So? The Great Powers had decided on a policy of appeasement against Nazi Germany. What exactly would you have proposed the USSR do? They signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact prior to the war for a reason.
Without the Eastern Front, Europe was lost. Hitler only launched Operation Barbarossa because he thought the Western Front was all but won. Continental Europe was under German control and the UBoats were locking down most of the Atlantic, meanwhile imports of Russian materials was sustaining the German war economy (similarly, imports of American materials was sustaining Japan's war in China and the Pacific)... Of course, it turns out that dividing your forces and taking on Russia in the winter aren't the best ideas, but at the time Germany wanted energy independence and the Caucasus was seen as an easier target than the Middle East (which at the time out produced Romania but wasn't yet the oil superpower it is today).
That's all well and good, but that's never taught at all to Russians and ignored by tankies.
And if you actually read your dumb narrative, your first paragraph is contradicted by your second. You really need to work on your story.
Here's the truth: the USSR, like Nazi Germany, was an authoritarian expansionist nightmare that was happy to get Poland for free. They only fight the Nazis because they had to. And Stalin was a shit strategist.
25% ish of the Russian population live in huts and shit in holes in outhouses for a lack of plumbing (mostly ethnic minorities), all while the ruling Mafia collects yachts and private jets, and launches wars.
I'm not saying there isn't wealth inequality elsewhere, but how about a bit of perspective here. Russia cannot actually conscript too many ethnic Russians or use them as cannon fodder, since that is the only ethnicity in Russia that matters politically, since they are the middle class. Instead they send the colonized people, who happen to be those who shit in holes for a lack of plumbing.
Poor people are overrepresented in the army? No way!
It's a conscript army. They shouldn't be.
You say that, but conscription always has exceptions, which usually include having an important job or going to university, which would presumably skew the result towards more poor people in the army. There's also corruption of course.
Improved infrastructure and better access to education is not the win you think it is. Whether infrastructure and education is good or not depends on what you do with it. If you use your infrastructure to connect unruly provinces to your center of power in an effort to better exert control, then the infrastructure becomes a net-negative for the people on the receiving end. As an example, I'm sure nobody sane enough would claim that the US building the railroad was positive for native americans. Likewise, if you use your education to indoctrinate people, then better educational opportunities go hand in hand with increased oppression.
That all sounds like brigading emotional nonsense. In fact, there were strong reasons for Russia to invade. It is probably true that Russia was manipulated into invading, it had no choice because of strategic decisions made by Ukraine. It's a shame none of the people you talked to were able to argue the issues sensibly.
Lol Ukraine strategically decided not to surrender their territory, thus manipulating the peaceful Russians to invade
Why should Russia strategically be required to invade exactly?
I've never heard a cogent argument on this point.
It's because Russia sees NATO as a threat and wants to take control of Ukraine to keep buffer states on the west side. Also, to keep it'sblack sea fleet safe. Why it happened now and not sooner or later - nobody knows. The official reasoning, of course, is bullshit, just like with any other war. Not the worst one, though.
Of course Russia had a choice. Not invading a country is the easiest thing to do. I do it every day, and I have nowhere near the power and resources that Vlad Putin does.
Exactly why the choice is so easy for you.
Well here is your chance. Argue this issues sensibly.
Probably the tired line of NATO expansion fears. How'd that work out? Does Russia have more or less NATO countries near their borders? The invasion itself is the best sales pitch NATO could ever need.